Duncan Harley

Despite her advanced age, Lucy is not a difficult cat. Easy enough to look after and supremely affectionate,  she mainly sleeps in the shed nowadays. Natasha, a local cat walker, sees to her when I am away and in the big scheme of things Lucy seems reasonably happy with her lot. Until last year, she over-summered in a Chinese neighbour’s garden. Replete with Rose Bay Willow Herb the cat space suited her until after council warnings and dark nods from the folk on the street, said Chinese trampled the fireweed down and now dry damp clothes above Lucy’s summer-laden-cat-space. I, and most folk in the street were bemused when, alongside trampling the Fireweed and the Dandelions, the neighbours stripped the Holly and the Rhododendron bushes of greenery. Perhaps they are frightened of Pandas. They left the Fuchsia bush and the Leylandii intact however, but I have no idea why since we do not speak because of the weeds and in fact that they are off my Christmas card list due ...

The blogosphere is a funny old world really. An article in today’s Guardian set off a train of thought about a long dead pal. Nigel was his name if you must know, and he picked up road kill on a whim to feed his many cats. There were at one point thirteen of the feline buggers living and shitting in his living space and the sheer cost of Felix must have strained his resources to the hilt. Hence the feeding of rabbits, pheasants and the occasional flattened fox to his co-habitants. He lived in a series of variously run-down country cottages of the type commonly available in those splendidly hippie days that were the 70’s, then the 80’s and perhaps the early 90’s. His last place was a well-used caravan over at Monymusk at the back of an old mill. The kind landowner had agreed on a peppercorn rent on the basis that the mill and its adjoining miller’s house would be his for a few decades, providing he agreed to renovate it to a habitable standard. Well, Nigel was no easy tenant. An...